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remmymilkyway's blog

USACO Not Responding
By remmymilkyway, history, 8 months ago, In English

As some of you may know, there is a competitive programming contest on the website USACO for pre-college students like me. The contest is running now but the website is not responding!

When using Google Chrome to visit the website, it returns a 502 error. When using Mozilla Firefox, it returns a blank page. Did any of you encounter this problem? Can it be solved?

Thanks.

UPD: The USACO official website has announced this:

Announcement

This is caused by a DoS Attack!!!

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8 months ago, # |
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Yesterday, I also participated in the contest. After around 3 hrs the website seems to be not working. First I thought that I had encounter some internet issues but CF, Atcoder, etc were working. I think because of a lot of contestant in the contest might the have some server issues.

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    8 months ago, # ^ |
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    Yeah, I hope they'll do some sort of compensation for those who got cut off in the middle of a contest.

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8 months ago, # |
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It should be caused by DDoS. I have almost no time now, but I still can't access the website!

Anti-DDoS!

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8 months ago, # |
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Auto comment: topic has been updated by remmymilkyway (previous revision, new revision, compare).

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8 months ago, # |
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it'll keep happening until usaco learns and installs https and cloudflare one day

(it also got ddosed last year)

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    8 months ago, # ^ |
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    Has it happened several times before?

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    8 months ago, # ^ |
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    How does https and cloudflare protect against ddos? Cloudflare is just another server like the one usaco uses now right?

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    8 months ago, # ^ |
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    no lmao, cloudflare is trash

    and how does https have anything to do with it

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      8 months ago, # ^ |
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      I mean, cloudflare is trash for codeforces, but in a contest where you are (presumably) just thinking for most of the time with no penalties, I doubt the negatives would matter at all.

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        8 months ago, # ^ |
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        "ok i'm stuck on p2 let's check back on p1"

        usaco.org

        Checking if the site connection is secure

        □ Verify you are human

        usaco.org needs to check the security of your connection before proceeding

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          8 months ago, # ^ |
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          Thing with usaco is that it has 1/2 the number of problems, 2x the time, and no penalties. A couple minutes matters a lot in CF, but i doubt anybody would really care if USACO directors decided to chop 5 minutes off the end of a contest.

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          8 months ago, # ^ |
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          Any not clown usaco contestant will open all problems in separate tabs...

          (and on cf, should open full problemset to mitigate)

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    8 months ago, # ^ |
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    A week ago or so, USACO attempted to enable HTTPS.

    With a self-signed certificate... They reverted it a few minutes later.

    For anyone not in the know, enabling HTTPS on a website properly is so mind-bogglingly easy there is literally no possible reason one could not have it enabled other than ignorance or extreme incompetence.

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      8 months ago, # ^ |
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      It's possibly university regulation, iirc they are using server at Clemson. I know in earlier times of berkeley calico contest they also didn't have https for a similar reason.

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